Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

A while back someone was telling me how she just couldn’t understand how people believe in God. Ok, you may be thinking, she was an atheist. The proper statement of atheism, though, is, “I don’t believe in God,” not, “I don’t get why you believe in God.” The former is a belief; the latter is a failure of imagination.

When people speak as if their failures of imagination have independent significance, we call that the argument from ignorance, argumentum ad ignorantium. The argumentum ad ignorantium is the assertion that a statement is false because it has not been proven true. A related fallacy is the argument from lack of imagination—I’d call it the argument from dullness—the assertion that a statement is false because the speaker cannot imagine it being true.

Often the argument is implied, and only the ignorance is professed. Willful ignorance is a common rhetorical tool. For example, abjorn professes ignorance when it comes to Republican popularity:

I just don’t get it. I don’t. … I don’t get how Newt Gingrich can think that little “Purple Heart bandages” are funny. I don’t understand how Ted Poe can continue the disgusting Republican tradition of slandering the French without anyone considering this to be a completely dishonorable act that is unbefitting a public figure.

It’s not restricted to politics by any means; Naomi Chana doesn’t understand why other people aren’t as interested as she is in the history of the Hebrew liturgy:

There is also a lamentable lack of historical curiosity on the part of the average Jewish liturgical participant… I find very few synagogue-goers (and remember, this is already an interested subset of the Jewish population) who want to know which parts of the service are rabbinic and which medieval, or which parts of the Aleinu got edited out when… I have trouble understanding this level of apathy; I can only put it down to really, really lousy Jewish education.

These aren’t the best examples, just the most recent ones I spotted in my RSS reading. I find it fascinating that people will profess ignorance (or misunderstanding) of something as common as Republican beliefs or layman disinterest in deconstructing the liturgy. People are interested in what interests them; there’s no accounting for taste. Other people’s beliefs are never a mystery to me; I may not agree, but if I’m confused people will explain. There’s not much opportunity for misunderstanding politics when people are ranting about it 24/7 on both sides.

I assume the professors of ignorance are just misusing the word “understand” to mean something deeper—say, “empathize.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 8th, 2004 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.